A new report from WWF-Canada paints a dire picture of Canada’s wildlife, finding that fully half of the species monitored have declined since 1970.

Among the species that are on the decline, populations have dropped by a whopping 83 per cent on average, according to the living planet index, a measure of biodiversity based on population trends.

“The sheer magnitude of it… is really very, very sobering,” said David Miller, president and CEO of WWF-Canada.

The study includes iconic species like the woodland caribou, which has been losing habitat to logging, mining, and oil and gas development, and lesser-known animals like the piping plover, a small shorebird that’s dropping in numbers due to development and beach use.

Altogether, the report includes 3,689 populations of 903 vertebrate species in Canada that have been monitored between 1970 and 2014. Researchers compiled existing data from government databases, academic analyses and community-based monitoring initiatives. It’s the first report of its kind in a decade.

“Pretty much in every region, there’s some group of species that is declining,” said James Snider, vice-president of science, research and innovation for WWF-Canada.

In Atlantic Canada, marine fish populations have dropped by 38 per cent, while grassland bird populations have declined by 55 per cent in the prairies, the report finds. In B.C., animal populations that depend on freshwater ecosystems have dwindled by 14 per cent.

The major threats to biodiversity, according to the report, are habitat loss, climate change, pollution, unsustainable harvesting and invasive species.

“I think the lesson to take from this is that we can’t just look at the decline of an individual species, that there are overlapping causes and that we have to look at species within the context of their ecosystems,” Miller said.

It’s not all bad news, however. Though the report finds that 451 monitored species are on the decline, another 407 have increased in abundance since 1970. Some of those are animals that have adapted well to living alongside humans. Others have been targeted by specific conservation efforts. Birds of prey, for instance, have been on the upswing since the banning of DDT, a pesticide that was found to thin their eggshells.

There needs to be a sense of urgency

The report also takes aim at Canada’s Species At Risk Act (SARA), enacted in 2002. The results show the rate of decline of at-risk species may have actually increased since SARA came into force, though it may take decades before some species show the benefits of protection under the act.

“There’s no evidence, at least from our study, to suggest that the current process is leading to the broad-scale recovery of species at risk in Canada,” Snider said.

Miller said part of the problem is that it often takes years for the government to officially list species at risk and then to take steps to protect them. The St. Lawrence beluga, for example, was listed as threatened in 2005, but a recovery strategy wasn’t published until 2012. The whale was upgraded to endangered in 2017.

“There needs to be a sense of urgency,” Miller said. “We have to, as individuals, as businesses, and as organizations like ours, work together to address these challenges before a species becomes at risk.”

Still, some scientists argue that the living planet index should be taken with a grain of salt. Stephen Buckland, a professor of statistics at the University of St. Andrews in the U.K., said such biodiversity indicators can be misleading.

For one thing, there’s often more research available on at-risk species than on healthy ones, which could mean the living planet index includes a disproportionate amount of data from populations in decline. That could skew the overall results, he said. “You’d expect the biases to reflect more decline than there is.”

Buckland published a paper in August in the journal Biological Conservation that pointed out the problems with the index. In it, he showed that weighting biodiversity data in different ways could produce very different results.

“I could come up with a different way of stratifying their data and I’d get a very different estimate again and that’s bothering,” he said.

Buckland is reluctant to criticize the living planet index too harshly, though, because it’s undoubtedly true that many vertebrates are dwindling in numbers. In fact, some scientists say the planet is now in a period of mass extinction due to human activity.

“There’s hard evidence of decline in a number of species for anthropogenic reasons, and the extinction rate is a lot greater now than it would have been historically,” Buckland said.

Still, he believes it’s “really pretty impossible to get a scheme that will hold water” for biodiversity monitoring on a large scale, and he worries that the living planet index, despite good intentions, is “quite badly biased.”

“I’m not sure it does any favours in the long term,” he said.

From coast to coast, a look at how Canadian creatures are faring: Southern resident killer whales (orcas)

Numbering just 78 individuals, the southern resident killer whale population has been listed as endangered in Canada and the United States. The whales are found around Vancouver Island, as far north as Haida Gwaii and as far south as California.

The orcas’ fate is linked to that of the Chinook salmon, their preferred prey, which have been listed as endangered by Canada’s committee on endangered wildlife (COSEWIC).

As numbers of the prized, fatty salmon have dwindled due to commercial harvesting, warming waters and dam construction on the rivers they use to spawn, the killer whales have gone hungry. Even though other salmon stocks have fared better, the whales often refuse to switch. The orcas are also suffering from water pollution and increasing marine traffic.

Swift Fox

The story of the swift fox is one of cautious optimism. Roughly the size of house cats, swift foxes once lived across the Canadian prairies, but were driven out and killed as the land was converted to farmland. Wild swift foxes were last seen in Canada in 1938.

But in 1973, Canada began a captive breeding program for the foxes, and started reintroducing them to the wild 10 years later. Today, swift foxes occupy about three per cent of their former range in Canada, including in Grasslands National Park in southern Saskatchewan.

In 2009, there were an estimated 647 foxes in the country, and the foxes were downgraded from endangered to threatened in Canada in 2012.

Researchers believe some of the animals are now reproducing independently.

Bobolink

Bobolinks are another casualty of intensifying agricultural production across Canada. The small songbirds breed in meadows and hayfields across southern Canada. The males are easily identified by their jet-black fronts, white backs and a yellowish band across the back of their heads.

Researchers say the bobolink population has shrunk by 88 per cent in the last 40 years. The birds often nest on the ground in hay fields, and are frequently killed when fields are mowed before the young can fly. In 2013, it was estimated that 667,000 young bobolinks are killed each year by farming operations across Canada.

Bobolinks have also lost habitat as pastures have been converted to urban areas. They face threats in their wintering grounds in South America as well. Jefferson salamander

They’re not animals of great beauty, but the slick, brown-grey Jefferson salamanders have become such a source of concern in Ontario that the city of Burlington now shuts down a stretch of road every spring to let the amphibians cross to their breeding ponds unharmed. Jefferson salamanders are born in ponds, but live under logs or in leaf litter as adults.

The secretive salamanders are found in isolated populations in southern Ontario and Quebec. While the species isn’t at risk globally, it’s now listed as endangered in Canada. Road mortality is a major threat, as are habitat loss and the draining of wetlands. St. Lawrence beluga

The iconic white whale of the St. Lawrence is among the best-known endangered animals in Canada. When cod stocks declined in the 1920s, belugas were blamed and the Quebec government subsidized the bombing of the whales in the St. Lawrence estuary. In the 1930s, a bounty was offered for each beluga killed.

When beluga hunting was banned in the 1970s, the population was estimated at less than 1,000 animals, down from 5,000 to 10,000 a century earlier. The whales, which can live for 75 years or more and are cut off from other beluga populations, are also threatened by pollution, shipping activity and entanglement in fishing gear.

The St. Lawrence belugas were first listed as threatened in Canada in 2005, but a recovery strategy wasn’t published until 2012. They were upgraded to endangered in 2017.

Little brown bat

In what may be the most rapid decline of a mammal ever documented, 94 per cent of hibernating little brown bats in many parts of eastern Canada have been wiped out in just a few years. The culprit is a fungal disease called white-nose syndrome, which appeared in Canada in 2010.

The fungus disrupts the hibernation of the bat, waking them up and depleting their energy stores. It has been spreading westward, and is expected to affect the entire range of little brown bats in Canada, which stretches across the southern part of the country, by 2028. The bat was emergency-listed as endangered in Canada in 2014.

Little brown bats are important insect predators, and can eat their weight’s worth of insects in a single night.

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